“She’d painted her nails with rainbow stripes and it occurred to him that Vicki was just as beautiful and mysterious as a rainbow.One he’d been chasing for years without ever coming close to reaching the pot of gold at the end.”

“All he knew was that she was beautiful...and that, somehow, despite everything he’d done to try to stop it from happening, she’d managed to steal his heart one sassy smile at a time.”

“And still, even when he’d told her how he felt about her, and that he wanted their fake relationship to be real, she’d held herself back out of fear that their friends-to-lovers story was too good to be anything but fiction.”

“I’m bad at some things.”She raised an eyebrow. “Name one thing.”Making you fall in love with me the way I’ve always been in love with you. You only ever saw the jock while you let those artist assholes chase you. And hurt you.”

“God, the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life was giving up what he wanted so that the woman heloved could get what she needed.”

“And it was why he loved her. One of the reasons, anyway. Because he also loved her brattycomebacks. He loved the way she put her entire self behind whatever she was doing, even if she had noidea what she was doing and was getting it all wrong. He loved the way she danced as if she wasconnected to the clouds and the sun and the rainbows.And he loved that she’d stormed into his life and turned everything upside down before he ever hada chance to stop her.”

“Maybe it was simply that falling in love wasn’t something Lori would ever be able to turn away from, regardless of just how much pain she knew would be coming down the pike. And maybe, just maybe, as long as she never actually confessed to him how she felt, that would make it okay to give in to what she felt for Grayson for one night, beneath the moon, with the smell of wild grass and the ocean all around them...”